December 14, 2015

Coke, Mexico, ISIS and other things.

editor:	Gurmeet Singh

So imagine you get to build your own society. You’re God for a day, and you need to build a hospitable, functioning place for people to thrive. What do you get? Food, water, shelter – obviously. What else? Jobs/ duties – sure. Culture – oh yes. Philosophy – stick it on the bill. Coca-Cola? Hmm. Maybe. Anyone got any better ideas?

Well, according to Coca-Cola, they are building a better society. In Mexico, at least. You’d think the only things they were building was a massive pile of money, while hospitals had to build bigger waiting rooms to accommodate all those diabetes and obesity patients desperate for treatment – but sure, ok, let’s take them at their word, Coke’s building a better society.

So why exactly were they forced to pull a recent advert in the country? The company’s latest TV spot has got a small army of white, urban hipsters travelling to the Mixa region to give the indigenous community Cokes and spread some Christmas vibes. Big love.

It’s predictably well-made, everyone’s happy, there’s even a nice filter to the lens. Commercialism and religion have an obviously long and violent historical romance, and there’s no need to go into that now. But, there are two points which make this particular advert remarkable:

• Firstly, the imagery of Coke being distributed like Bibles to the natives is unbelievably crass.
• Secondly, Al-Jazeera reports that people featured in the ad were happy to take part; they did not feel humiliated or exploited.

On the first point: there’s no contention, this trope is not only astonishingly insensitive, it’s so boring. Are people really still peddling the enlightened/ benighted dichotomy in 2015? Sure, they are – from ISIS to racist cartoons, this stuff still happens. Boringly enough, people still believe they are helping others – by giving them food, a Coke, or in Isis’ case, killing them.

On the second point, this is something to take seriously. When we defend a principle like proper representations of people – we should take their viewpoints seriously. If we don’t, we risk repeating the mistakes of the people we oppose. If we believe people should be represented properly in visual media, and that they should be given full credit and respect for what they want – then we also have to take into account that they might want to have Coke handed to them by a white, urban hipster.

If we deny this, we’re really no better than the people peddling such stereotypes in the first place. We say, ‘yeah, the natives might want a Coke, but they don’t know any better – they don’t understand the world like we do’.

This is one of the more jagged pills socially-liberal people have to swallow: defending what you disagree with. Everyone knows Voltaire said something like, ‘I don’t agree with what you say, but I’ll defend you’re right to say it’. Well, I fear that’s a principle we’re losing – we can’t simply shut down debate because it’s not the one we want to have.

That doesn't mean of course tolerating everything. The defence of principles requires hard thinking and hard work; there are no easy answers. The people in the ad consented to their involvement, which makes this a nuanced issue. There are people in Syria who probably consent to ISIS' involvement in that region - does that mean we should support that? No. See - it's difficult. But if we want to build the societies we want to see, we might have to just stomach a Coke ad in the process.